2) Crosscheck, the longrunning Republican effort to stop blacks, hispanics, poor, college students, and other likely Democrats from voting, dumped millions of people off the voter rolls.

The link above talks about how fewer blacks and more whites voted in the relevant precincts, framing it as mere turnout. Had blacks voted in 2008-type numbers, it would have changed the outcome. Personally, I think Crosscheck needs to be subpoenaed and examined minutely, because I’d be willing to bet money that Crosscheck is the difference, not “turnout.”

3) There were enough people in the country who, when faced with the choice between one of the most accomplished candidates in a century and an actual monster chose the monster. Because the accomplished candidate is female. That’s how toxic the patriarchy is.

(For comparison, Obama — with almost no experience at the time — ran against McCain, who was Churchill compared to the dogpile we have now, and yet Obama was not given concrete shoes to run in. Racism is toxic, see Crosscheck above, but it’s rattlesnake venom compared to misogyny nerve gas.)

My point is that if we didn’t have way too many feverishly irrational hatreds seething in this country, then Putin would have nothing to work with.

If we were smart, we’d be dissolving the hatreds as well as preventing his meddling.

We’re not even doing the latter, yet anyway. So I’m not holding my breath.

7 Responses to 'Putin isn’t the biggest problem for the USA'. Post a comment

If there were a microfollower of blogs here, I’d’ve probably just outed myself over on another blog, as having been the original author of that “amputated future” metaphor. But I don’t comment that often (as opposed to Branjor 🙂 ) so can see why that happened.

About this excellent post:

It’s a follow-on to your previous exemplary one about the power that the pervasiveness and toxicity of sexism has on young women, causing them to deny their own perceptions and reality and side with the males they know, over their own interests.

We’ve just had another illustration, if any were needed, that sexism is the strongest, most ubiquitous, longest-lived and deadliest prejudice the human race hosts.

Young women are going back to this and worse: my own young adulthood, wherein I read “Sex and the Law” in an Atlanta library (harassed as always by some random male), reading up at 25 on how we were coming out of the dark ages; that brief time when PBS, the EEOC, and Justice Department were all on our side; when even Fedex and UPS actually, briefly, hired women for the same no-skill jobs that let young men launch themselves safely into their adult lives.

The southern state university that gave me my degree (“Alma Mater”? snort – in no way was it my mother) officially let women work all jobs they had available only in my last two years.

This was in the late 70’s, long after all such jobs were not only in law but in fact, open to males of any race (including this southern university). A year before that, I had asked for the factory jobs the university’s employment office sponsored and was told, over ten years after the Civil Rights of 1964, “those jobs are for men”. The “men’s” jobs paid $4/hr., the “women’s” jobs, $1 – in addition to the expectation of sexual use from men that women had to go through from managers and customers, long before Catherine McKinnon and Elinor Holmes-Norton made the EEOC promise actual reality for women.

In order to use the same 60 minutes in every hour, the same 24 hours in every day that male students had to pay for the sex-blind student fees, tuition, housing and food, I had to work four times as many hours. When the government cut student loans (for all sexes equally) I had to drop out of fencing just when I would have been part of the nucleus that went on to form that university’s official team. And dropped off the Dean’s List.

I still had an adulthood the female (of any race, especially white) tRump and Sanders supporters will only dream of. The older years, maybe not so much, but, again, better than their expectations. Because their decisions were suicidal and can’t be rectified by such as them.

Oh no, earlynerd! You really want that deleted? I will if you want of course, but it’s a damn good comment!

I’m sorry to hear about all the tribulations you had to go through. I lived the same time in Cambridge, Mass, so some things were less stark. But it’s all the same bad music, even when in a different key.

The thing that’s the worst is not decades ago. The thing that’s the worst is that, as far as I can see, it’s actually worse now. More sexualization, bigger constraints on acceptable behavior (only it’s called what’s “cool” so that’s totally different of course), an almost vanishing pool of men who retain much humanity in the porn-soaked spirit of the time, so if you’re het you can forget about it, and on and on and on. For that, they get paid 70 cents on the dollar instead of 25.

It does sound as though both of us, and, I suspect, a lot of others on the Hillary supporting blogs have lived through that period so accurately described in Susan Faludi’s “Backlash”, when even the media was briefly on women’s side, and then watched that progress begin to crumble starting with the Reagan years and picking up the pace (much like global warming) as it got worse.

Not only women’s rights to earning their own living, as opposed to marrying it, are in worse shape now than they were thirty years ago, but all the other rights that go with being allowed an adults’ autonomy, such as owning one’s own physical being are as well. The feminist women’s health clinic (in downtown fscking Atlanta!) even taught the procedure for vacuum aspiration abortion, abortions were legal, unremarkable and no one’s business; the “debate” over birth control was over increasing its safety and availability; the Catholic Church was running scared as the supremacist minority government it has never ceased being; football and fraternities seemed to be on their way out, the word “bitch” was considered as much an obscenity and as much hate speech in radio and television broadcasting as its exact racial equivalents; billboards, magazine ads and shopping mall restaurants did not routinely use women’s body parts and subordinate status to sell products to men; televised media did not routinely use women’s bodies and minds as the targets of sexualized jokes; there may have been fewer female newscasters, but those that did exist were not uniformly hired to pair up with old, ugly men as their on-air second or third wives; women and girls wore clothes in daytime, business and public settings that were functional and not extremely sexualized. One thing that never changed, though, was advertising that showed housecleaning as done only by women and child care as done mainly by women.

If I may add to the comment posted above as well, just to give background to what I’ve been shouting to deaf ears for the past 30+ years: in my junior year, that university for the first time allowed women into their previously all-male jobs, under threat from an EEOC finally forced by N,O,W. to start enforcing the ten year old laws protecting women. I spent the summer painting dorms and classrooms, at a salary four times higher that of my previous horrible jobs. That job paid not only for that quarter, but travel to Europe for a year of living on the economy as an au pair, as well as attending school there. That was one single summer’s worth of difference!

I also discovered the joys of manual labor: it may have been repetitive, but the job didn’t depend primarily on pleasing men, and to a lesser extent women, through conformance to female stereotypes and on having to deal constantly with men’s attempted sexual use of me when they’d judged “pleasing” to fall on the other side of the fine line women are forced to walk in “women’s jobs”. Painting buildings, I could see the work I’d done, others could see it, it could be judged objectively and doing it well enough was all that mattered to the bosses in that job. I carried that experience into eventually finding programming and computers as a alternative to my first full time, below poverty wage “woman’s job” after college (women were still expected to marry the employer who provided all or most of their livelihood, while wages for “women’s jobs” were considered some sort of weird, almost unnecessary, gift)

The laws that allowed me that work haven’t been enforced at a federal level in so long, I doubt that even grade school girls in most states today are going to have a chance at anything like it. The tokens that are all employers, even huge federal contractors like FedEx, allow in to keep window dressing like the EEOC and OFCCP in their useful places, are too few to affect young women’s choices of careers. Not to mention the employers (so dear to Obama’s heart) in trades like construction, utilities and road building, that are so proud of having no women employees that they put up “men working” signs on public roads.

Given your kind words and reckless encouragement, I’d written in greater detail about how the laws allowing women to work have been made all but non-existent, but will exercise -some- restraint and just post this.

I can’t tell you how grateful I am that someone with your depth of knowledge, experience, writing skills and credibility continues to keep women’s rights front and center.

Sorry it took so long to get back to your comment. (I take unscheduled breaks from reality, well, continuously these days!)

Some really interesting background there. When you lay your work history out like that, it’s like a marker. It makes me remember –“Yeah, that used to be right there.” But now it’s some dot in a distant time even I feel like I barely know. Things have gotten worse so fast and so quietly even if you’ve lived it, the past can seem unreal.

You may think I’m nuts, but what I get comfort from during our world’s drain-circling is the eons-long view. Every time in the past when a society fell apart into dark ages, after enough centuries go by the new civilization that appears is better in some respects than what went before. And they gradually know more and see further and get better at limiting the powerful. (I mean, sure, we have baboons with the fingers on nuclear buttons, but nobody — nobody — believes they have a divine right to that.)

So, anyway, this ramble is to say that we’re headed down the porcelain fixture, as far as I can see, but what’s reborn after that will probably be something that would amaze us by how much better it is. (Those future people, of course, would roll their eyes and point out everything that was wrong.)

And I’m also convinced that those of us who try to stick to what’s right, however we do it, add seeds to that future.

Your view is similar to Hillary’s, I think. It keeps people functioning in the worst of times. A hard one to hold on to, but unselfish and realistic, much more practical than giving in to despair.

I binge-read one of your books a few days ago, by the way, and thought I’d sent you an actual email, but can’t find it.

So in case you didn’t get it, let me say that “Thieves of Sorrow” was a great read. Very good pacing, sympathetic main characters and just the right balance of actual science (in a sci-fi novel, no less!) to flatter the understanding of amateurs like me, be an integral part of the plot and still not leave us in the dust.

earlynerd, thank you so much for the kind words! Really. Made my day and I’m still totally tickled.

Now I want to cheer you on to go read #2 (None So Blind) & #3 (Without a Doubt) that have those same characters.

My story writing actually has a political history, too. I started when Bush the Elder was running and nominated Quayle for veep. “For the women’s vote.” As somebody said at the time, “Well, in that case, we want full disclosure. Front and back.” Me, I was just so disgusted I did my first big withdrawal from reality and started writing sci-fi. More absorbing than simple reading. It doesn’t get worse than this, I thought. Good times.

(No, I didn’t get an email. The “Contact” tab near the top takes you to a form that usually (?) works. That’s the only way I’ve found to keep my inbox freeish of spam.)

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"What is the difference between a realist and a dreamer? The realist thinks that someday a UFO will come down and hover over the UN building, and that the aliens will come out of the UFO and offer to share their technology and solve all our world's problems.

The dreamer thinks maybe we can get our act together and do it ourselves."

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